American Fuehrer

American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party is a 1999 book by historian Frederick J. Simonelli. It was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1999. It is a biography of the neo-Nazi political activist George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, who was assassinated by one of his followers in 1967. It was the first mainstream biography of Rockwell published. In writing the book, Simonelli, then an assistant professor of history at Mount St. Mary's College, drew on interviews, government documents, and family files related to Rockwell.

American Fuehrer tells of Rockwell's life, beginning with his 1967 assassination by his former follower John Patler, then retreating to his childhood, path to becoming a neo-Nazi, and founding an activity as the leader of the American Nazi Party. It recounts the Solomon Fineberg of the American Jewish Committee's tactic of "quarantine" against Rockwell, which was used to lessen the amount of media attention on him and to prevent him from getting power. In the last year of his life, he began to denazify the party and renamed it the National Socialist White Peoples' Party.

Simonelli argues that Rockwell had a substantial impact on the white supremacist movement in his creation of a more inclusive pan-ethnic white supremacy idea of white power, his combination of neo-Nazism with Christian Identity doctrine, and the fact that he was one of the earliest Americans to express Holocaust denial. The book received positive reviews, with praise for its writing and research. Its analysis of Rockwell received praise from several reviewers, though some found it to not tell the full story. It was compared to Hate, another book on the same subject matter published the same year, by several reviewers.